Conveyor belts are used in many processing and handling applications for goods. Typical applications of conveyor belts include but are not limited to: transporting, changing elevation via inclines or declines, changing direction via turns, spreading, converging, diverting, combining, accumulating, positioning, orienting, and processing. Modular plastic belts, comprising brick-lay patterns of duplicate parts, are a common type of belting used in many applications. Modular plastic belts have several known and well understood shortcomings which place limitations on the design and types of conveyors that are able to be manufactured. One of these shortcomings is stress concentration when the conveyor belts are subject to turns. The links of modular plastic belts typically collapse on the inside radius of turns and separate from the load carrying connecting pins, which in turn, creates a stress concentration towards the outer radius. This stress concentration greatly reduces the overall load capacity of the belt. Therefore, conveyors having turns are limited to short lengths, minimal quantity of turns, and limited payload capacity. Production lines containing modular plastic belt conveyors with turns typically require a high cost due to the high quantity of drive mechanisms needed to run multiple conveyors. These production lines also contain frequent belt-to-belt transfer points which can sometimes cause product handling issues.
Another shortcoming of modular plastic belts is that they have a fixed width, meaning, the width along the entire length of a typical conveyor system cannot vary. When applications require spreading or converging product in-stream, the use of a fixed width belt often becomes problematic. In some cases, fixed or active rails systems are used above the conveyor belts to slide product transversely across the belt. These types of rails have been known to cause problems such as damage to delicate product, or difficulties with product handling due to the loss of velocity control that occurs as the product slips. In other cases, multiple strands of narrow straight belts are used at angles to each other in order to diverge or converge product. These systems inherently result in “dead” spaces between the belts which have been known to stall or damage product.
The present invention provides a solution to overcome many of the shortcomings of modular plastic belt and also creates new opportunities for system level designs. The present invention relates to a conveyor belt which can vary in overall width, shape, trajectory, and surface speed during travel. In addition, the present invention inherently and automatically distributes payload stresses throughout its entire structure, making high load capacities achievable in numerous applications, including turns.